Home Assistant is building its own desktop app for installing Home Assistant OS, and on 21 October 2026 it published the first two test builds. The Home Assistant Installer (HAI in the repository) is a cross-platform application that flashes SD cards for the Raspberry Pi, ODROID and other boards, installs on generic x86-64 and ARM64 mini PCs, flashes or restores Home Assistant Yellow and Green, and creates virtual machines in Proxmox VE or in UTM on a Mac. The repository has existed since 30 April.
On the same day the team merged a feature that removes one of the first chores of a new installation: the installer can now write Wi-Fi settings into the image, so the device joins the network on first boot.
Alpha 1 and alpha 2
Versions 0.0.0-alpha.1 and 0.0.0-alpha.2 appeared on GitHub a few hours apart. Both come as a universal .dmg for macOS, an x64 setup .exe for Windows, and .deb, .rpm and AppImage packages for Linux. The second build collects a long list of fixes, such as checking that the extracted image will fit before downloading, letting Stop work at every stage of flashing and checking Proxmox settings before the user confirms the install.
These are early builds, and it shows. The Windows installer is not signed yet, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher. The app also does not check for updates or update itself, so newer versions have to be downloaded by hand.
The README lists proposed requirements for the coming beta: macOS 14.5, Windows 10 or 11 with a current WebView2, and Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or newer, or a maintained Fedora release on Linux. The team calls these proposals that still need testing on real machines.
Wi-Fi before the first boot
The new step, by Ariel Ebersberger, shows up after you pick the target drive. It is optional and covers the Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5, Home Assistant Yellow with a CM5, and generic x86-64 and aarch64 computers. It closes issue #361.
The installer adds the network to a CONFIG/network/ folder on the image's boot partition while writing, and patches it in memory, so the extracted image file on your computer stays unchanged. On first boot, Home Assistant OS copies the settings into NetworkManager and deletes the CONFIG folder, so the password is left neither on the boot partition nor on the computer.
The step only handles password-protected WPA2 and mixed WPA2/WPA3 networks, and it says so on screen. Open networks, WPA3-only networks and hidden networks are not supported.
The pull request also lists what has not been tested: joining a network on a real Raspberry Pi, and the macOS and Windows writers, whose change was only compiled by CI. A patched x86-64 image did boot in QEMU and imported the network without warnings. The feature was merged a little under two hours after alpha 2 was published, so neither alpha build has it yet.